Cuna de lobos

Leonora Navarro (Diana Bracho), a young woman from San Cristóbal de las Casas, Chiapas, works in Mexico City and lives at the home of her godmother, Esperanza (Carmen Montejo). One day, a car crashes into the windows of the office where Leonora works and she tries to help the driver, a wealthy businessman, owner of some laboratories, named Carlos Larios (Raúl Meraz), who dies in the accident. Larios' son, Alejandro (Alejandro Camacho), thanks Leonora for the help she has provided. The two get along and agree to see each other again.

Alejandro is married to Vilma (Rebecca Jones) and they both live with the former's mother, Catalina Creel (María Rubio), who wears an eye patch. Alejandro has an older brother, only by father, named José Carlos (Gonzalo Vega), who lives abroad and returns for his father's funeral. Catalina Creel hates her stepson, José Carlos.

The will of Carlos Larios is read and it establishes that his children will not receive his inheritance until they give him a grandchild. Catalina is happy because Alejandro has advantages over José Carlos, since the latter is not married and does not seem to have any intention of getting married; instead Vilma can get pregnant at any time.

But Vilma is sterile and only she and Alejandro know about it. Alejandro hatches a plan to have a child: He will make Leonora fall in love with him in order to get her pregnant and then take her child away from her. Leonora corresponds to Alejandro's love without knowing that he is married and she gives herself to him; soon after, she discovers that she is pregnant.

Alejandro makes Vilma a participant in his plan and, due to the latter's desire and desperation to have a child, she accepts to fake a pregnancy. In the eyes of the world, Leonora's child will be hers.

Some time later, Catalina discovers that her daughter-in-law's pregnancy is faked; still, she becomes an accomplice of Alejandro and Vilma to get Leonora's child. Meanwhile, José Carlos is constantly humiliated by Catalina, who blames him for having gouged out her eye with a spinning top when he was a little boy. José Carlos, who loves Catalina as his own mother, suffers remorse for it. Catalina, alone in her room, removes her patch and it is revealed that she has not lost her eye and that she is only faking in order to torment José Carlos.

The time comes for Leonora to give birth. Using tricks, Alejandro takes her to San Miguel Allende, to a clinic run by a certain Dr. Syndell (Ramón Menéndez), where she is cared for by the sinister nurse Rosalía (Lilia Aragón). When the child is born, he is taken away from Leonora and delivered to Vilma.

Leonora, realizing the trap she fell into, decides to fight like a she-wolf to get her son back and take revenge on Alejandro, Vilma and Catalina.

She will accidentally meet José Carlos and it will be through him that Leonora will manage to reach the Larios family; in the meantime, the two will fall in love. At the same time, Catalina Creel will go on to commit several crimes so as to ensure that no one discovers her two greatest secrets: That she has not lost her eye and that Alejandro's son, whom they call "Little Édgar", is not Vilma's.

The central character in Cuna de lobos is Leonora Navarro, played by Diana Bracho, who portrays the victim of the "wolves", only to "become" a "she-wolf" herself to seek revenge.

The main antagonist is matriarch Catalina Creel, played by actress María Rubio, a villain in the grand dramatic tradition of Dynasty's Alexis Carrington, Dallas' J. R. Ewing, or Knots Landing's Abby Cunningham.

Catalina's unnatural devotion to her only son caused her to conceal a healthy eye behind the lie of blindness, commit a series of murders, beginning with that of her own husband, Carlos, (his mistake was realizing how evil she truly was) and to participate in the abduction of a child to ensure an inheritance.

Such was the impact of her performance that most soap opera villains take her as a role model and, when a program parodies a soap opera, the main villain is usually based on her.

Cuna de lobos was so popular in its native country that, on the night of the final broadcast, the streets of Mexico City (infamously choked with traffic) were deserted, as the locals were in their homes glued to their TV screens. It has been re-screened several times in the United States and Australia in recent years. A remake has been in talks for several years, with one finally surfacing in 2019.

The first DVD of Cuna de lobos came out in 2002. It was a single-disc DVD that contained the entire telenovela edited down to a little over 230 minutes. A second DVD release came on March 8, 2006. While it expanded the telenovela to over 11 hours played on three DVDs, the original instrumental music and soundtrack had been erased and substituted by new music. According to Televisa, this was due to a disagreement with Mexican actress and producer Carmen Salinas, who used to own the music rights after her deceased son Pedro Plascencia Salinas, producer of the music of the telenovela.

• Cuna de lobos at IMDb
• Cuna de Lobos
• Beyond soap - BBC embraces villains, plot twists and Latin style of telenovela at The Guardian contains a significant mention of Cuna de Lobos